...For the Love of Fine Words.
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Thursday, September 13, 2012

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Rating: 3 Stars

The concept of Utopia
has been around in Literature for quite a while. As far back as 400 BC, Plato
described in his Republic an ideal
society ruled by philosophers where women are communal property and children
are bred by eugenics. All riffraff claiming artistic or literary ability are
naturally banned. Brave New World,
published in 1932, is the first modern novel to develop further the ideas
expounded by Plato. The author leaves it to the readers to judge the virtue of such
a society.

In the year AF 632, the
World State governs on the doctrine of Community, Identity, and Stability. To
ensure that there is no deviation from these guiding principles human beings
are produced in labs to conform to the State’s requirement for uniformity.
Viviparous birth has become tantamount to obscenity, and the bottle-bred
infants are subject to social conditioning from birth that they may adhere to a
strict caste system, and imbibe the commandment that ‘Happiness is the
Sovereign good.’

Pursuant to that ideal,
soma is distributed to all to dispel
any negative emotions that may discombobulate the populace. As the saying goes,
“Better a gramme than a damme.” To add to all this perfection, it’s a world
where women are not only…’pneumatic’, but also have a delightfully laid-back
attitude about getting groped, or being ‘had’ by every male in their social
circle. The ‘F’ in AF 632, by the way, stands for Ford, and the crucifix has
been supplanted by the symbol T.

This charming world of happy
pills, free-range promiscuity, and unlicensed consumerism receives a titillating
surprise when it encounters John Savage. Savage is of accidental viviparous
birth, and has been raised on a Native American reservation. His brain befogged
by Shakespeare, and nursing alien hang-ups about sex, Savage is an anomaly in
the World State, but determined to claim his right to God, discomfort, inconvenience,
and unhappiness.

As I’ve said earlier,
sometimes a work of fiction is remembered not for having done something the
best, but for having done it first. It’s probably this criterion that allows Brave New World to be labeled a ‘Modern
Classic’. Without over-reaching for wisdom, Huxley settles for snippets of
cleverness and long-winded, fatuous philosophy. In a hodgepodge of
anthropological incoherence, residents of the World State guzzle down Indo
Aryan soma; the boy raised on a
Native American reservation has oddly Puritanical and sado-masochistic
tendencies; and, the dark-skinned races are classified as having sub-par
intellects. The novel is broadly derivative in its inspiration, and simplistic
in its prognosis of all the possible moral and spiritual ailments that may
beset society. It’s a trait unique to dystopia fiction that the writers will
persist in their dismal glass-half empty perspective. As a depressing consequence,
their reader is left to chase away the blues…and without even a gramme. Damme!

2 comments:

Huxley is turning in his grave nearly 100 years after his visionary prophecies began to form into his own mode of fiction. He is one of my favorite authors and raised serious issues and made world-wide breakthroughs in the research of psychedelics as well as our cognitive liberties. I drew a portrait as homage to the man and his works. See the him roll with the mushrooms, the pills and the doors of perception at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2010/07/aldous-huxley-rolls-in-his-grave.html